Burns : journal of the International Society for Burn Injuries
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Fires involving mass burn casualties require extreme efforts and flexibility from the regular health care system. The café fire in Volendam, which occurred shortly after midnight on the first of January 2001, resulted in the worst indoor mass burns incident in Dutch history. During the extensive medical evaluation of this disaster, it became obvious that information on similar incidents is relatively scarce in the literature. This article systematically reviews the existing information in the medical literature on indoor fires and provides findings and knowledge used in the evaluation of the medical management after indoor fires and for future mass burn casualty preparedness, mitigation and response. ⋯ Characteristics of indoor fires, which are relevant for disaster preparedness, mitigation and response are not frequently reported in medical literature. The current articles on indoor fires, mainly report on numbers of casualties and the mortality. Limited data are available to provide insight in the characteristics of management and medical treatment and to come up with suggestions for improvement of future burn incidents management. The evaluation of disasters should be based on uniform methods and structured reports and effective record keeping is essential to achieve this.
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Review
The relative thermal stability of tissue macromolecules and cellular structure in burn injury.
When tissue is subjected to higher than physiological temperatures, protein and cell organelle structures can be altered resulting in cell death and subsequent tissue necrosis. A burn injury can be stratified into three main zones, coagulation, stasis and edema, which correlate with the extent of heat exposure and thermal properties of the tissue. While there has been considerable effort to characterize the time-temperature dependence of the injury, relatively little attention has been paid to the other important variable, the thermal susceptibility of the tissue. ⋯ The lipid bilayer and membrane-bound ATPases show a high probability of thermal damage (almost 100% for the former and 85% for the latter) for short heat exposure times. These results suggest that strategies to minimize the damage in a burn injury might focus on the stabilization of the cellular membrane and membrane-bound ATPases. Further work will be required to validate these predictions in an in vivo model.
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Health care systems constantly struggle with ways to provide higher quality care in a cost-effective manner. Outcome measures serve to evaluate what works and what does not. Whether they are used for research or for the improvement of clinical practice, they are as such, efficiency markers and the first step in determining the consequences of health care. ⋯ Optimal management of severely burned persons is enormously expensive, and even after survival is ensured, may require a protracted period of surgical, medical and psychological rehabilitative measures for many years. This article aims to review the outcome measures in the acute phase of burn management (mortality and morbidity from the post-burn hypermetabolic response). We further discuss long-term outcome measures (such as, quality of life measures, exercise tolerance and evaluation of return to pre-burn activities) that are now becoming of equal importance as the numbers of burn survivors increase.